Who Is Doubletalk In William Lutz's The World Of Doublespeak
We hear and read doublespeak every day, but if you were to ask a person what doublespeak was, they’ll more than likely have no clue what you’re talking about. What exactly is Doublespeak? Doublespeak, often called “soft language”, or “doubletalk”, is language that has been distorted or changed in order to make an unpleasant, difficult, or just negative situation not sound nearly as awful as it actually is. In his essay “The World of Doublespeak”, author William Lutz discusses the ways in which doublespeak is used, and the dangers of not being aware of when it is being used. Lutz writes that doublespeak is used so often that it is hard to identify when it’s even being used. Furthermore, he claims that doublespeak can destroy the function of …show more content…
The first kind of doublespeak is called euphemism. Euphemisms are used to soften a statement so that what they say does not sound harsh or unrelenting. This type of doublespeak is probably the most common; it’s almost imbedded in our culture to use these words now. Some examples are “passed away” instead of died, “on the streets” instead of homeless, or “elderly” instead of old. The second type is known as jargon. Jargon is lingo shared between members of a specialized group like doctors, lawyers, or educators. It becomes doublespeak when it is used to intimidate, confuse, or impress those who are not familiar with the terms. The third type of doublespeak is gobbledygook or bureaucratese. Gobbledygook is meant to sound impressive to an audience, but is essentially just a way of piling on as many words as possible in order to confuse them. The fourth type of doublespeak is inflated language; language designed to make something seem much more important than it is, like working for a “fortune 500 company”, rather than being a sale associate for Walmart. All of these types of doublespeak share one thing, that is, they are all used intentionally, and have one goal in mind, to conceal
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